DOJ Sends Washington Secretary of State Letter Asking Him to Hold Ballots of Over 400 Listed Voters Untabulated; Oct. 28 Noon Deadline, Else Emergency Relief

Dated Oct. 26, 2026, a letter from the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington and the Eastern District’s deputy federal prosecutor asks Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to review a DHS-sourced list for citizens and, for any listed voter whose ballot comes back, to instruct officials “to not verify the signature and/or tabulate the ballot until citizenship can be determined.” It sets a deadline “by October 28 at noon PST” and says otherwise “the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief.” The letter went by email; the attached list is not in the copy we read.

Which number comes from which document: the letter says “over 400 individuals and over 1,500 total votes.” The figure 405 appears in KOMO’s report of the press conference, not in the letter text we read. Hobbs’s office says “One of the approximately 400 records in the DOJ letter is from 1994.”

What the letter says of its list: it came from DHS (“a list of names of persons who are noncitizens”), and the people “may have subsequently naturalized.” The Secretary of State’s Oct. 26 statement is not a reply to the letter; it says the office will “only respond to requests that follow due process.”

Compare California, where DOJ went to court for an order and county letters asked officials to segregate ballots; here the step is a letter with a threat of emergency relief, and no court filing was found (RECAP for the Washington districts was not searched).